Thursday, October 14, 2004

Al Franken was on the radio yesterday saying that it's wrong for
Sinclair broadcasting to order their TV stations to broadcast the
anti-Kerry "documentary" because it's an in-kind contribution from
the broadcasters to the
Bush campaign.

He's dead wrong.

It's wrong for them to broadcast the thing because it's blatant
slander. The "Swift Boat Veterans" began with claims about Kerry's
service in Vietnam which have since
been exposed as blatant lies --
my personal favorite is Larry Thurlow claiming that there was "no
hostile fire" on a mission where both Kerry and Thurlow were
awarded medals, and damage reports show Thurlow's boat came back with
bullet holes. And the central charge of this movie -- that Kerry's
testimony before the Senate somehow lent "aid and comfort" to the
North Vietnamese, or worsened their treatment of American POWs --
doesn't even pass the laugh test. Kerry was testifying after the My
Lai trial -- heck, after "free fire zones" had been official,
acknowledged Army policy -- so the fact that atrocities had occured
against civilians was absolutely no secret to anybody. These guys are
liars, who have sacrificed their honor for sleazy political cheap
shots, and the slime rubs off on everyone who willingly goes near
them.

The broadcast shouldn't happen because it's slanderous, not because
it's political. As Franken ought to know. On his show's recent tour,
he wound up every live broadcast with a stemwinder speech urging his
live audience to get out and work for the Democrats. If politically
partisan broadcasts get treated as "in-kind contributions", he's off
the air.

2 Comments:

Al Franken isn't saying his encouragement to work for Democrats isn't news, though.

That's the problem with the Sinclair broadcasts. They're being aired as news. If the Sinclair people want to broadcast propaganda as news, they need to go buy cable channels like Rupert Murdoch or newspapers like the Moonies, because broadcasting them as news violates their broadcast license agreements.

After the demise of the fairness doctrine, news broadcasters are free to make their news broadcasts as slanted as they like. Franken certainly does -- quite a few of his stock bits, like "The Oy Oy Oy Show", are stylized ways of presenting news which is invariably unfavorable to the Bush administration. The difference between that and "Stolen Honor" isn't that "Stolen Honor" is more explicitly political -- it's not; it never says "vote for Bush". The difference between Franken and the Swift Vets as that his facts are facts.